“We all make mistakes, Sergeant Kelly. Mrs. Turner was pleasedwith Becky’s work. She wouldn’t have dreamed of letting her go, and certainly not without mentioning it to me first.”
“Becky had worried about being fired, though, hadn’t she, Mrs. Pike? After she broke the gravy boat?”
“She got upset when Mrs. Turner snapped at her, yes, but the matter soon blew over.”
“She ran off, didn’t she?”
“Not far and not for long. She was frightened, that’s all. It was nothing more than a young girl’s silly overreaction.”
“You believe, then, that Mrs. Turner gave her the rabbit as a gift?”
“If that’s what Becky says, then yes, I believe it. Considering what happened next, it seems to me Mrs. Turner had good reason to give Becky a little something to remember them by.”
But Mrs. Turner-Bridges frowned when this possibility was put to her. “If that were the case, it seems strange that the only person Isabel thought to leave with a farewell token was a clumsy eighteen-year-old girl from the village.”
“You think it’s likelier that Becky was fired and took the rabbit to spite Mrs. Turner?”
“I know how upset being fired would have made her. She was very attached to baby Thea.”
“Too attached?”
Mrs. Turner-Bridges paused very briefly. “In my view, yes. It concerned me.” She broke off then and her hand leapt to cover her mouth. “You don’t think the girl had anything to do with what happened to them, do you? If she was upset over being fired, it would be one thing to seek revenge through the theft of a precious ornament. But surely—surely—she wouldn’t have done anything so wicked as to harm them?”
“Complete poppycock!” Mrs. Pike said to this. “No. Not ever. She wouldn’t have dreamed of such a thing, let alone known how to do it. Why, even the suggestion makes me sick to the stomach. She loved Mrs. Turner, and the feeling was mutual. In fact, now I think of it, Idoremember seeing the two of them together that morning. I’d just arrived, it was eight o’clock, and I glanced through the door into the good parlor on my way to the kitchen. It was a lovely sight. Lovely. Mrs. Turner had her hand on the top of Becky’s arm, and Becky was smiling down at something in her hands. Something white, yes, I remember now. It was right before I went into the kitchen and saw Mrs. Turner’s favorite teacup on the bench, broken into pieces. ‘Now, that’s a bad omen,’ I remember saying to myself. ‘Nothing good can come of that.’ And I was right, because look at everything that came after and all that’s happened since.”
***
7
Whatever it was that Mrs. Turner and Becky were discussing in the good parlor, John Turner took the opportunity of his mother’s preoccupation to put some distance between himself and the house. He had been disgruntled by her insistence that the family spend the middle of the day together and had a sneaking suspicion that if she caught him “lurking” (her pet word), she was just as likely to decide that he was “bored” (her pet hate) and assign him “things to do.” And while he didn’t mind helping—was constitutionally glad, in fact, to be considered useful—at thirteen years of age, John was a very busy person with other ideas about how best to spend the coming hours. He had, in fact, arranged to meet his friend Matthew McKenzie by the fence that ran between their fields.
John’s friendship with Matthew was only a new one. They had met early in 1959, at a session of the scouts at Woodhouse over near Piccadilly, and it is fair to say that the two had not hit it off at once. Indeed, John had been troubled enough, when he came upon the other boy using a magnifying glass to fry ants by the old water tankbehind the scout house, to mention the issue to Henrik Drumming as he helped chop wood one afternoon. “John was a soft-hearted lad,” Mr. Drumming was to tell police officers during his interview in the week after Christmas. “One of those boys that presents all happy-go-lucky—a big smile on his face, a willingness to give things a go—but whose trust and loyalty leave him vulnerable to the wrong elements.”
“Was Matthew McKenzie a ‘wrong element’?”
“He was a different sort of boy; harder, sneakier. Not his fault—life works like that sometimes. But if I’d been young John’s father, I’d have been steering him in a different direction.”
But John’s father had been away from home a lot during 1959 and Matthew lived next door and enjoyed a long rope for a boy his age. His residence at Farmer McKenzie’s was fairly recent, after his mother, Mrs. Eileen McKenzie, formerly a secretary at a doctor’s surgery in Norwood, relocated to Sydney with her new fiancé, and his father, a dentist with a busy slate of patients and a “hands-off” approach to child-rearing, deposited the boy with his own parents at their farm in Tambilla. Farmer McKenzie and his wife had been stern disciplinarians with their own children, but the bafflement and bewilderment of having their grandson arrive on their doorstep in their golden years had found them unprepared.
Until recently, had John been asked to rate his friends and allies, he’d have topped the list with his sister Matilda, followed closely by his best mate, Marcus Summers. But John had really started to dislike Matilda lately. When he looked at her, he could hardly recognize his partner in so many games and adventures. She had once been as skinny as he was: knobbly knees, strong ropy legs, scabbed elbows. They’d been the same height, and she’d often pulled on his trousers when the two of them were heading outside. But over the previous summer she’d grown inches taller than him. She’d changed her hair, so that rather than tie it out of the way she was leaving it to hang loose, and even doing some secret thing overnight thatmade it curly the next day. A horrid odor had started coming from her room, too, of rosewater and talcum and concerning, womanly things. Smells like that were fine for Mother—lovely, in fact—but from Matilda’s room were a betrayal. John did not like it when things changed unexpectedly, and his response to this development was to behave with as little maturity as possible. For Matilda’s part, when she deigned to look at him, it was with one of two attitudes: as if he were invisible, or else a smudge of cow dung that she’d walked onto the rug.
Things with Marcus weren’t much better. They had met as five-year-olds on the first day of school and been as tight as could be for the next seven years, even sharing the role of sports equipment monitor in year six. But Mr. Braun, teacher of the years six and seven composite class at Tambilla Primary School, told police that he had observed a fresh tension between the boys this year.
“Young Marcus came back after the last summer holidays with a different attitude. It’s not uncommon with that year level. Hormones have a lot to answer for. He was more sullen in general, but he seemed to have set against John especially. A shame, as they were always such good mates.”
John was no more certain of the cause when he spoke to Mr. Drumming of the rift.
“He was real sad about it,” the farm manager was to lament in the days after the Turner deaths. “I know it’s not a big thing, the friendship between a couple of lads, after everything that’s happened, but I keep thinking of the boy. He was lonely, I reckon, with his dad gone so much. I came across him one afternoon, up in the shed where I keep the machinery, sitting alone there in the dark. I could tell he’d been having a bit of a cry, but I didn’t know what was troubling him. I just planted my hand on his shoulder. ‘He’s my best mate,’ he said then, and, ‘What have I done to make him hate me? He won’t even come near my house anymore.’”
Police, during their investigation, were to learn the source ofMarcus Summers’s ill mood. As it turns out, it had nothing to do with John Turner, although John was not wrong when he observed that his friend was avoiding his house. It was Reverend Ned Lawson from St. George’s Anglican church who was able to shed some light on the matter.
“Marcus Summers came to me one afternoon and told me that he’d caught someone close to him in a compromising position, up at the hollow tree on the Turner property.”
Sergeant Kelly, though respectful by nature, was the sort of man who’d been calling a spade a spade for as long as he’d been able to speak. He spent a few seconds trying to decode the implications behind the reverend’s evidence before deciding he simply didn’t have time for such delicacy. “Can you tell me who and what we’re talking about, Reverend Lawson?”
“His older brother had been courting young Matilda Turner.”
“And he saw them together?”
